


800 Years Later

by NOT_Kirie_Goshima



Category: Uzumaki
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Eating Disorders, F/M, Nostalgia, Not A Fix-It, POV First Person, Past Violence, Post-Canon, a lot of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-10 23:39:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4412408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NOT_Kirie_Goshima/pseuds/NOT_Kirie_Goshima
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>800 years after Kurozu-Cho was destroyed by the spiral, Kirie and Shuichi are finally un-frozen and are able to move again; and, consequently, escape before the spiral cycle repeats itself. Basically, I felt like writing a sequel. A happy one, too. Yay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	800 Years Later

As you might imagine, it is quite disconcerting to awaken from what seemed only like blinking your eyes to find out that you were in a coma for eight-hundred years. As soon as I opened my eyes, I felt like no time at all had passed since Kurozu-Cho had been destroyed and rebuilt into a horrible new form, and although my arms had returned to normal, my whole body still felt extremely strange. Shuichi had taken a lot longer than me to wake up. I think he may have been actually asleep, or perhaps unconscious. 

Getting out of the spiral hell wasn’t easy. I was weaker than usual and slightly queasy, and Shuichi was horribly injured from his fall off the spiral staircase; being frozen in time, neither of us had aged, but his broken legs hadn’t healed either. Which meant I had to carry him. Okay, he was really light, but once again: I wasn't exactly at my physical peak.

On the surface, the first thing I noticed was that the town looked like a normal town. No spiral row houses. No horribly twisted corpses. Actually, there were no houses at all surrounding Dragonfly Pond. The second thing I noticed was that the town looked absolutely nothing like a normal town. The air was filled with what looked like strange flying vehicles. The buildings looked nothing like anything I’d ever seen or heard of before. Children played in the street on objects resembling flying skateboards. It looked like something I would have read in a sci-fi novel, not something that should really exist. Perhaps I was in another dimension? I wouldn’t be surprised if I was. Hopefully there was a hospital. Ha! You know someone’s from Kurozu-Cho when they arrive in another dimension and think about getting their injured lover to a hospital, instead of stopping to question what on Earth is going on!

Shuichi was in the hospital for a long time. Weeks and weeks, and with each passing day, I was worried that by the time he got out, it would be too late for us to leave and we’d end up having to survive another Spiral curse.

When he did get out, Shuichi was in a wheelchair. His injuries had been far worse than either of us had thought. On the plus side, however, he was eating again, without having to be forced. Apparently, starving himself was not an option at the hospital. He certainly looked a lot better, and by that I mean he no longer looked like a walking skeleton; he had to have gained almost ten pounds, and thank god for that.

According to Shuichi, recovering from whatever it was he had that made him refuse to eat anything was hard. At first, eating anything triggered a lot of painful memories, and consequently, panic attacks. It must have been horrible, but it was certainly relieving to see Shuichi stuff his face with cookies (without me having to force him to).

While staying in this strange place, I found out that the town is, in fact, Kurozu-Cho, and not an alternate dimension. The reason why people thought my name, clothes, and manner of speech were all so strange. It is the year 2753, and I still looked and acted like it was the 1950s! To these people I was archaic, a living relic. It made me consider becoming a historian after escaping Kurozu-Cho. I’d certainly be good at it, in this day and age.

The entire area around Dragonfly Pond had been turned into a really big playground. A really big playground that might have been the most fun I’d ever had. This stuff didn’t exist, eight-hundred years ago, and I knew absolutely nothing of how it worked, and it was hard to believe that where there was now some kind of swingset, my house used to be there. 

I started laughing. Hard. I couldn’t help myself! I suppose one might have expected me to cry, but somehow I just couldn’t stop laughing.

“I am eight-hundred and ninteen years old! My house used to be there, Shuichi! I lived right there! Eight-hundred years ago! We used to go here and play by the pond, and then my brother would run outside and try to fling mud at us!”

Shuichi smiled (for the first time in over eight-hundred years!), and then started laughing as well, pointing in the opposite direction.

“And my house was just a few blocks that way, if I remember correctly!”

“Eight-hundred years ago! God, I remember I told you, in the year ninteen-thirty-nine, that there was a monster in the pond that would eat you if you got too close. You were scared almost to tears!”

“That wasn’t funny at all, Kirie! Do you have any idea how scary that seemed, at the time?”

Though Shuichi was telling me that that joke hadn’t been funny, he was still laughing. 

“It was funny! See, you’re laughing!”

Part of me couldn’t believe I was laughing my head off about things that were destroyed now, in a town that I knew darn well was doomed to a horrible destruction about a decade from now. Maybe the old Kirie Goshima would have cried, or perhaps yelled insults, but really, in the face of all that I’d seen in my lifetime, talking about my house being destroyed was one of the least traumatizing things ever. And easily not the cruelest thing I’d ever done. 

It was almost a month before Shuichi could walk properly without help, and we could leave. Within that month, there were several “unexplained” deaths, several “mysterious” disappearances, several “strange” suicides, and Shuichi and I started seeing a lot more spirals than there should be in one town. We both knew what all these deaths meant. They meant that we had to get the hell outta there. Part of me wanted to warn people, wanted to tell them what was coming, but I was already considered an abnormality; surely if someone who already looked insane tried to claim that the town was “contaminated by the spiral” and talked about everyone’s impending doom, they wouldn’t be listened to. I realized that this must have been how Shuichi had felt, eight-hundred years ago. It really sucked. All these people were gonna either escape traumatized or die horrible deaths. Or worse. 

Oh well. This time, I wasn’t sticking around to survive another Spiral curse. Shuichi and I left Kurozu-Cho as soon as we were able to. We went to Midoriyama-Shi, and lived there for several years, pretending to be the ages we must have looked and trying to live as normally as two archaic teens who are terrified of spirals could. Adapting to what seemed such a futuristic lifestyle was hard, but not impossible.

After all, Shuichi and I had both survived much worse. Much worse.


End file.
